It does quite a good job. I drew a number of shapes and characters and it always had the right match in its list of possible matches.

The tool was created to recognize unicode characters that we only roughly know the shape of. As you see in the screenshot above, it shows the possible shape along with information related to that character. It doesn’t require any sign up, so you could just start drawing in the box and hit “recognize” to get the results.

Features

• Draw shapes and characters and find their names.
• No registration needed.
• Similar tools: Unicodinator, NiceEntity, UnicodeTable and JoyLy.

Check out ShapeCatcher @ www.shapecatcher.com (By Abhijeet from Guiding Tech)

Unicodinator is a web tool that lets you visually navigate through Unicode blocks and codepoints 0000 through DFFF. You can click on any character and have its encoding details, comments, and location appear.

To jump to a specific category of characters you can access a particular type of block using the site’s “Block” menu in the top right.

Unicodinator can be used to identify a particular character, understand the various Unicode blocks, and find shapes to use in non-image icons.

Features:

• A user-friendly web service.
• Lets you visually navigate through Unicode blocks.
• Can be used to identify a particular character.
• Includes encoding and comment for each character.
• Similar tools: NiceEntity, UnicodeTable and JoyLy.

Check out Unicodinator @ www.unicodinator.com (by MOin from ThumbPress)

To use Twitter Symbols, go to the app’s homepage and connect your Twitter account with the app. From there you may type in your tweet in the text box in the app’s homepage. The symbols are located in a menu underneath the text box. The symbols are conveniently organized into categories so that you can easily find the icon that you are looking for. Just click the symbols that you want added in your tweet and press the send button once you are done.

Make your tweets less boring and more fun by adding icons and pictures to them using Twitter Symbols.

Features:

• Add symbol characters to your tweets.
• Icons are neatly organized into categories.
• Install the bookmarklet to easily access Twitter Symbols.
• Similar Twitter Tools: FbSym, JoyLy, CopyPasteCharacter and EntityCode.

Check out Twitter Symbols @ www.simbolostwitter.com/p/english.html

You can browse through them by category or in order. Simply mouse over any symbol to see an enlarged image and the code you can use to insert it into a webpage. The tool also gives you the name of every symbol but unfortunately doesn’t let you search by the symbol name which would have been an excellent feature.

Features:

• Interactive unicode symbols table.
• Get code for thousands of Unicode symbols.
• Browse using categories or in order.
• Includes lines, shapes, mathematical and foreign language characters.
• See an enlarged image and name for any symbol.
• No registration required.
• Similar tools: FbSym, JoyLy, CopyPasteCharacter and EntityCode.

Visit UnicodeTable @ www.ftrain.com/unicode [By Tehseen from Ijaar]

Facebook Symbols is a simple to use website. The symbols can also be used anywhere else in Facebook where you can type text, for example, comments, descriptions, etc. To port the symbol, you simply double click on it to highlight it; next you copy it using the CTRL+C keyboard shortcut and paste it into Facebook using CTRL+V. The site’s bookmarklet lets you quickly pop up the symbols when you need them on Facebook.

Features:

• A user-friendly web service.
• Lets you include special symbols in Facebook status updates.
• These symbols can used anywhere on Facebook where you can type text.
• Offers a bookmarklet for better accessibility.
• Similar tools: JoyLy, CopyPasteCharacter and EntityCode.

Check out “Facebook Symbols” @ www.fbsym.com (By Umar from TechCityInc)

The Noun Project is a free and simple to use website that provides you with universal symbols. You can use these symbols in signs or your projects to communicate your message to people of all languages. People who speak a foreign language might not understand the text on your sign but these symbols will do the job. The site has a large collection of greatly useful and easily understandable symbols. Hovering the mouse pointer over these symbols presents suggestions where they can be used. You can click on a symbol to enlarge it.

With the symbol enlarged, click on the Download link in the top right to download that symbol. You can download a ZIP archive that contains the symbol in SVG format.

Features:

• A user friendly web service.
• Collects and displays many universally understandable symbols.
• Provides suggestions on where each symbol can be used.
• Lets you download the symbols in SVG format.
• Symbols can be used in your projects.
• Similar sites: NiceEntity, ElectricalWhat, JoyLy, CopyPasteCharacter, Symbols and EntityCode.

Check out The Noun Project @ www.thenounproject.com (via Swiss-Miss by MOin from ThumbPress)

You can browse through categories like Punctuations, Accents, Shapes & Symbols, Math and even filter them further using sub-categories. If browsing is not your thing simply search for the character you are looking for, or click on “all’ to display the complete list.

Once displayed, just copy the code for the character and use it in whatever way you want. The interface is easy-to-use and sleek which make NiceEntity all that more useful.

Features:

• Get HTML and unicode for special characters and symbols.
• Includes accents, punctuations, math, symbols and more.
• Browse through categories and sub-categories or search.
• View the complete list of characters.
• No registration required.
• Similar tools: JoyLy,  CopyPasteCharacter and EntityCode.

Visit NiceEntity @ www.nice-entity.com

Just specify the shape, attribute, terminals and geometry information about the symbol and ElectricalWhat will pull it up. With each tag, the tool will narrow your results down ultimately getting to the symbol that meets all the search criteria. Clicking on any symbol give you a detailed description along with the opportunity to leave a footnote.

Features:

• A guide to all sorts of electrical symbols.
• Browse through categories or search using keyword.
• Search by specifying symbol attributes.
• View recently added or random symbols.
• No registration required.

Visit ElectricalWhat @ ElectricalWhat.com

Simply click on the character you want to include and it will show up in your tweet. You can find characters based on categories like stars, actions, symbols, arrows, text or go through popular characters. The characters would be displayed in all web, Mac and iPhone based clients but can have some issues with Windows clients. You can also include a link to the tweet on JoyLy so even those with troublesome clients can view your complete tweet by clicking on it.

Features:

• Unicode characters for twitter
• Choose from over 100 characters.
• Browse characters through 6 different categories.
• No registration required.

Visit JoyLy @ www.joy.ly

There are four ways to search for symbols here:

1. Using simple keyword search.
2. Using graphic index tool for searching symbols based on symmetry, shape and crossing lines.
3. Using word index to find a symbol with a certain meaning.
4. Browse through symbols randomly.

Features:

• Check symbols and meanings.
• Search for specific symbols or browse symbols randomly.
• Contains more than 1,600 articles about 2,500 western signs.
• Buy a book that features everything you can find at Symbols.com plus an additional 100 pages of in-depth articles about symbols and ideograms.
• No sign up needed.

Check out Symbols @ www.symbols.com